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CIA sees no threat to Castro's power in near future
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Copyright ) 1997 Nando.net
Copyright ) 1997 Reuters
WASHINGTON (December 4, 1997 9:29 p.m. EST http://www.nando.net) - The
CIA says it sees no near-term threat to the staying power of Cuban
President Fidel Castro, an old foe and repeated assassination target in
the early 1960s.
"Fidel Castro appears healthy for a man of 70, and his political
position seems secure," CIA Director George Tenet said in a June
assessment to be made public belatedly this week.
"Unless he suffers a health crisis, he is likely to be in power a year
from now," Tenet added in a written reply to questions for the record
from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
Tenet's remarks were sent to the panel on June 12 for the publication
this week of the full record of an annual hearing on threats to U.S.
national security. Excerpts of his replies were obtained in advance by
Reuters.
A Central Intelligence Agency spokesman, Mark Mansfield, asked whether
the five-month-old assessment of Castro's grip on power still held, said
only that Tenet's comments spoke for themselves.
In his written reply to the panel, the CIA director noted that Castro,
who crushed a disastrous CIA-backed invasion by Cuban exiles in April
1961 at the Bay of Pigs, had "faced no challenges in recent years from
the Cuban elite."
The last "significant" case of popular unrest dated back to August 1994,
when anti-Castro demonstrators were quickly controlled in downtown
Havana, the capital, without straining the security forces, Tenet said.
Castro seized power on Jan. 1, 1959. He quickly angered Washington by
seizing U.S.-owned property in Cuba, 90 miles (140 km) from Key West,
Florida, and allying himself with the Soviet Union.
In line with President John F. Kennedy's wish to get rid of the bearded
leftist leader in the early 1960s, the CIA plotted such cloak-and-dagger
scenarios as the use of poisoned cigars, poison-tipped pens and
exploding seashells during a scuba-diving trip.
The CIA also undertook anti-Castro operations with the aid of the Mafia
crime syndicate's old gambling contacts in Havana and plotted to make
him look ridiculous by using a chemical to make his famous beard fall
out.
The latest unclassified CIA assessment of Castro's staying power
differed in tone from one done a year earlier for the Senate
intelligence panel.
"A successful coup or assassination would require luck and secrecy,
making the chances very great that we would have little, if any,
warning," the CIA had said in the year-earlier reply dated May 10, 1996.
By JIM WOLF, Reuters
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